A backyard refuge to work, practice, paint or meditate separates you from the activities inside your home and gives you prime views of your backyard, garden or urban rooftop space. Adding a freestanding room can be as simple as having a fully-assembled prefab volume plunked right onto your property, and you can often customize them your ideal interior configurations, windows, built-in furniture and surfaces. Order one of these ready-to-go options, or use them as inspiration to build your own.
Prefabs by InOutside
A wood-clad cube with one corner entirely consisting of glass, the ‘Cooba’ by InOutside is a prefab modern room that’s ready to be dropped into your backyard as a studio, office or guest space. It starts at just over $15K (AUS) and when there’s easy access to the site, it can be delivered pre-assembled, requiring no concrete foundation or special equipment.
House Arc by Bellomo Architects
A modular system of bent steel tubes serves as the basis of ‘House Arc’, an unusually shaped rehab designed with environmental sensitivity in mind. It’s got a lattice screen roof providing a bit of shade and interest, rounded ends , translucent panels to let in light, and sliding glass doors. It’s made to be fully off-the-grid, can be flat-packed and shipped in a box that’s barely larger than that of a typical IKEA bed frame, and weighs 3000 pounds when complete.
Modular Library Studio by 3rd Space
Is this the coolest backyard room of all time? 3rd Space didn’t just add an office to the garden of a literature professor in Oxfordshire – they gave her an entire private library, with floor-to-ceiling windows and walls lined with books. The prefab system can really be used for anything, but the custom shelving really makes this unit special.
Green Roof Garden Studio by Eco Space
Vertical slats and optional green roofs add a whole lot of charm to Ecospace studios and their smaller models, including the medium-sized MidiPod. Based in the UK, Ecospace offers a sustainable and affordable alternative to a fixed addition. These studios are flexible and modular so they can be tailored, reconfigured or extended. The WorkPod is the smallest of all, built for a single user with a typical installation time of just 5 days.
The LoftCube
No backyard to work with? How about a roof? The Loft Cube functions like a ready-to-go rooftop extension and ranges in size from a modest 365 square foot volume, which requires no building permits in its home nation of Belgium, to a volume that’s plenty large enough to live in at over 900 square feet. You can even stack the cubes on top of each other to create a larger dwelling.
